Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Friday, December 7, 2012

Retrospective Tax Enforcement Again: IRD & Accommodation Allowances

As I explained in this post,
regarding how retrospective law enforcement belongs to dictatorial tyrannies,
not Western social democracies – though apparently also in social(alist)
democracies - IRD in New Zealand are now routinely imposing retrospective
enforcement on a populace with no ability to fight them. And I say no ability
to fight them because what can an individual do against a department already operating outside the rule of law;
especially when issues like this are put to the Minister, as I did on Twitter
last night - and he's being alerted to this post – but like Nero he simply just
ignores anything that doesn’t suit him in the ruthless pragmatism of turning
his department into a juggernaut concerned with obtaining maximum money from
the taxpayer, regardless of the law, to feed a State that continues to spend irresponsibly.
I’ve already written on how this Minister has his head stuck so far up the politick, his refusal to sign up to even the symbolism of a government spending
cap is a demonstration of an inappropriate focus only on building the
power of an abusive state, and not on who that state is supposed to be there
for: to protect the liberty of the individual citizen. And that this and
successive governments are evil – used in a secular sense – because they have
been ignorant of the classical liberal ethic and rule of law the free West was
founded on, and thus have unwittingly, to put the best case on this, used the
arsenal of the Fortress of Legislation, to destroy the decent society. We are
so badly served by our politicians, not one of whom seems to have done a
history lesson.

Yesterday the Commissioner of IRD announced a change to the treatment of accommodation allowances: you don't need
to know how this issue works, just that the new interpretation is to be
retrospectively enforced over the last two years:

[IRD] claims also that while the
ruling may appear to be new, such accommodation payments should have been
treated as income and attracted PAYE tax payments for some years. Taxpayers who
thought they had treated such payments incorrectly are being urged to make
voluntary declarations.

"In many cases those making
a voluntary disclosure will only be required to account for PAYE over the
previous two years, and they will not be subject to use of money interest or
shortfall penalties," Mr Tubb says.

KPMG's Taxmail succinctly sums up the problems:

The IRD’s position is contrary to common
practice, including its own previous statements, and seems to be trying to
rewrite history. The technical reasoning adopted in the Statement is unclear
and elements of the interpretation are inconsistent. We are not convinced IRD
has this right from either a technical or policy point of view.

And let it be known, when our
liberty and freedom were being destroyed, according to his tweets, our Minister
was only concerned with what is happening to the tabloid press in the UK. Not
good enough. In some small part only, this blog registers the absolute
disappointment and anger of that small but vital part of the citizenry that has a clue - if the moronic meme of the 1% applies to anything, I suspect only to that anymore.

Now, with anger on 100%, I have to move from a Minister who may well end up advocating torturing dogs so the 99% can deaden the pain of our social(alist) democracy with party pills, to my neighbour who I have little doubt uses the damned things, and has, after so much effort and aggro from this household to improve the lot of their poor wee dog, reverted yet again into a dog concentration camp. I'm pretty much over life circa 2012 at the moment.

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Civilisation is a movement toward privacy, an Orwellian surveillance state the opposite, and tax legislation, especially tax administration, has become the legislation and administration of surveillance and authoritarian rule, in contravention of the rule of law, and common decency. IR

If the Founding Fathers could see how freedom is bound, again, under the iron fist of our taxing authorities; New Zealand's IRD, America's IRS, UK's HMRC, a secret police operating in every country, there would be a Western Spring.

This blog is the only form my protest can take, hoping not to become a squashed blug on the windscreen of state.

Disclaimer: If you pay anything other than the correct amount of tax - as hard as that can be to calculate under our mess of tax law - then you're a bloody idiot. The IR's are all-powerful: they are not a construct of a free, voluntary, civilised classical liberalism, they are a relic of totalitarianism. You have no liberty or privacy from the IR's, you have no legal defence against them, you cannot refuse to be interrogated, you cannot question their actions or seek judicial review holding them to account, even the burden of proof has been turned against the taxpayer; before the law, though you have done nothing wrong, you have less rights than a murderer or rapist, and this Department has been charged by the Fortress of Legislation to systematically eavesdrop and investigate all of us. Don't mess with them. And let me put on record, the IRD staffers I deal with daily are ‘good’ people, I have no complaint whatsoever on a personal/personable level; but this blog is about the principles involved, and it remains my hope there is enough of a classical liberal ethic left, admitting debate and ' difference', that this blog is taken only for the contained - to these pages - protest that it is. For let me spell it out - you, Big Brother State, have won: I.Am.Scared.Of.You.You bet I am. But there's this loon in me that can't seem to shut up. (You're lucky, my poor wife has to live with it).

Copyright

All posts copyright Mark Hubbard and Life Behind the IRon Drape. Contents may be reproduced without permission provided credit is given to the author, it is not altered in any way, the context is made clear and a link is provided to the original.